10 Ways to Create a Winning Mindset

A person with a winning mindset is a person with the right tools to take on the world. With the right mindset, you can take on the impossibilities in life and make them possible. With this winning mindset, your challenges won’t really matter, as you will view them in a different light.

Many people go after their goals, expecting them to be unachievable. This is the only reason why they sometimes don’t achieve their goals. The first step that should be taken in the direction of achieving your goals is establishing a winning mindset. If you set out having already won the race in your mind, you are more likely going to actualize that.

Behavioral patterns or tendencies are responsible for the kind of mindset we have. Beliefs, emotions, habits, objectives, identity, and values all form our behavior. It requires discipline and a desire to be successful to get a winning mindset.

If you are looking to actualize your dreams or want to change how you view the world, then here are some tips to attain a winning mindset:

Positive Attitude
You need to develop a positive attitude, as it is essential to developing a winning mindset. A positive attitude has a lot to do with perspective. Your perspective about things need to change from negative to positive. Instead of seeing problems that you can’t solve, interpret these as challenges necessary to achieve your goals. When things don’t go to plan, instead of complaining and whining about your actions being a waste of time and resources, focus on the lessons learned and see every failure or challenge as necessary steps to achieving your goals. A positive attitude will also enable you to locate opportunities. When you take on a project or head into the unknown, you should be positive about the outcome. You will be rewarded by opportunities which you identify because you have opened yourself to them.

Dream Big
Allowing yourself to dream big ensures that you put in more effort into achieving success. It is tempting to cut down our dreams or make them appear more realistic because we do not want to be disappointed. A winning mindset, however, demands that you allow yourself to dream big. Your dreams should be so big that they scare you. Only then will you be able to put in the effort proportionate to making your goals achievable.

Know What You Want
A lot of people don’t know what they want from life. You should have the ability to know what it is that you want, to enable you to ask for it. When you know what you want, you feel a lot better about yourself and can do things positively. Once you’ve identified what you want, you can take steps to achieving those things. There is a sense of fulfillment. You don’t feel irrelevant or that you are wasting your time. After identifying what you want, ask for it. Reflect on it, visualize it and work towards achieving it.

Trust
You need to believe in yourself and in what you can become and have trust. Don’t sell yourself short or let anyone make you feel indifferent. Trust that you have all it takes to be who you want to be. Trust that even if you don’t have what it takes right now, you can get the requisite skills and resources. While trusting yourself, you need to keep your word and take action. You need to set out daily tasks and complete them. In doing these tasks or exercises you gain discipline and become accountable.

When you have trust, it is not just great for having a winning mindset. You will increase your beliefs in yourself and your ability to do anything.

Affirmations
This is a routine that is known to create a winning mindset.Affirmations are sentences aimed to affect the conscious and the subconscious mind. The words composing the affirmation, automatically and involuntarily, bring up related mental images into the mind, which could inspire, energize and motivate. Repeating affirmations, and the resultant mental images, affect the subconscious mind, which in turn, influences the behavior, habits, actions, and reactions. Affirmations are most effective when made in the morning before you set out for the day. This will set the pace and mood for your day, and you can end up achieving so much more.

Progress not Perfection
It is necessary that you begin to recognize your progress if you want to create a winning mindset. Having the ability to see how far you have come from the beginning is as important as the end goal. You will find that if your emotions are spent criticizing your failures, you are likely to get frustrated and not finish a project. If, however, you can recognize your progress, you will be encouraged to continue till you reach the end.

Gratitude
There is nothing more important than being grateful for what you have, and what you have accomplished so far. Being thankful for what you have does not only increase its value, it also brings about contentment. If contended, you are not going to make desperate moves to haul in more. You can strategize and put thought into your next move avoiding waste and unnecessary risks. Be grateful, no matter how little you have. Gratitude is a trait of a winning mindset.

Optimism
A winning mindset is one that conquers before setting out to do the task. Optimism is the ability to see good outcomes. Even if there are only challenges and difficulties in your field of vision, it helps to see the up side of things. Apart from laws of attraction that say you attract what you think, you are sure to complete a task if you can visualize a successful finish.

Avoid Comparison
Comparing yourself to others should be avoided. Comparison only brings hurt and does not make you better in any way. There is no benefit of being hard on yourself or using someone else’s yardstick to judge yourself. We are all headed toward different goals in life and must take different paths to get there. Even if you have similar goals as someone else, you are different individuals and have different ways of doing things. Remember that what may be an advantage for you, may have been a disadvantage for someone else, and vice versa. Mark your progress based on your abilities and previous accomplishments.

Get Support
You shouldn’t do things alone. Try as much as you can to surround yourself with people that love you and are able to tell you the truth. It is not uncommon to see people having coaches, mentors, and support groups and so on when trying to achieve a goal. They do this to get support and feedback. With a support system in place, you can get all the encouragement you need. You get suggestions and honest feedback. All this support should be given in a positive way to encourage a winning mindset.

There has been a lot of research carried out on the impact of a winning mindset. One of which is Barbara Fredrickson’s research on the impact of positive thinking on skills. This research exposed 3 groups of five people each, to either a negative, positive or neutral emotion. When these 3 groups were exposed to a situation, it became clear that those in the positive emotion group could come up with more actions they could take, than those in any other group.

Research has also shown that those with a flexible mindset have a higher potential for success. Reason being that they focus on the process instead of the results. The research, in this case, showed that people with fixed mindsets had more brain activity when information on their accomplishments is given. On the other hand, those with flexible mindsets have more brain activity when information on improving their skills is given. This proves that focusing on whatever makes you do things better goes a long way to becoming successful. Much more than focusing on what you have already achieved.

Own Your Goal!

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